


you're nobody till somebody loves you

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Category: Fallout: New Vegas, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: ...but if you fuck with any of His Kids..., ...you heard me, BAMF Joyce Byers, Billy Hargrove: Feral Cryptid, Cannibalism, Child Abuse, Eleven is Deeply Unsettling, F/M, Gen, Hopper the Once and Future Chief, Kidnapping, M/M, Nancy and Jonathan go on An Adventure, One Big Happy Family, Robin is a Delight, Slow Burn Harringrove, Steve Harrington is a Stone Cold Badass, Steve Harrington is a Sweetheart, Unethical Experimentation, Will is Deeply Confused, then it gets worse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-01-02 01:24:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21153287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: We're not in Hawkins anymore...The story of how a California trashbag and a hysterical babysitter cross paths, piss each other off, go on terrifying adventures, and fall in love. Oh, and it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland. So there's that....let's do Vegas, baby. You and me.





	1. begin (again)

**Author's Note:**

> Read. Those. Tags.  
I will try to post reminders or additions in chapters when there's something grisly coming up, but I have already placed the most frequent of the unsettling material in the tags! 
> 
> In this chapter, there are implications and references to child sexual and physical abuse but this is not discussed or described with any detail, nor does it happen to any named character.
> 
> This is such a bad idea. Okay, here we go. Story title is taken from the Dean Martin song by the same name (and is also referenced by Mr. New Vegas on the radio!) Chapter title is from the original song "Begin Again" written for the Dead Money DLC.

Jonathan hated being stopped by the patrols.

The Legion, for all that they made his skin crawl, wouldn’t bother a single pair of travelers in ordinary clothing with ordinary weapons. They looked what they were: a hunting party. They were not valuable enough or important enough to risk drawing attention to the Legion encampment as Cottonwood Cove, so the legionnaires examined Jonathan and Nancy as they walked by and did not stop or even address them.

But if they were spotted by an NCR patrol, they had to be prepared to spend close to an hour getting the third degree by whatever commanding officer had decided they would look perfect for a drab brown trooper’s uniform. It was the same routine every time.

No, they were not citizens of New California.

No, they were not independent actors. No, they were not mercenaries. No, they did not have any official citizenship papers. They weren’t refugees, they were tribals, and tribal bands didn’t acknowledge any leader beyond the tribe’s chieftain.

Yes, they were tribals. No, they were not raiders. Yes, their English was very good. No, they did not wear animal skins and put on face paint. Yes, they had ordinary-sounding first and last names.

No, they were not members of the Great Khans. They were from the Hawkins nomadic band. _Yes_, really.

No, they weren’t interested in becoming citizens of the NCR. Yes, _really_. Yes, they were very sure about that. No, they couldn’t be persuaded into signing on the for the army. _Yes, really_. Their tribe needed them and joining the NCR army without direct permission from their leader was as close as they could come in the Hawkins band to outright deserting the tribe. 

NO, they weren’t going to leave the tribe they were both born into. Your tribe was your family and you didn’t just decide to abandon your family. _YES, REALLY_.

“Fucking gremlins,” Nancy muttered as they stomped away in the opposite direction of the patrol. “They only want us as cannon fodder anyway.”

Jonathan gave a short, sharp nod. “Better to throw some tribals in front of the Legion than risk losing one of their own precious citizens.”

She snorted bitterly. Going into the world outside their band was often a pain in the ass, but he knew that for both of them it was worth it. He and Nancy had never really been temperamentally suited to staying with the band, guarding the bighorner herd, minding the little kids, or doing the mending and repairs. Jonathan missed Mom and Will a lot sometimes, and he knew Nancy missed Mike and Holly like crazy, but their siblings were in good hands and they served Hawkins better doing the hunting and the scouting than they would driving everyone up a wall back in the camp.

It was a slow day, too.

“Nancy…” he began, both knowing how he intended to finish that sentence.

Staring straight ahead, the tiny brunette kept making her way down the hill, slowly climbing down the massive rocks that led down toward the Colorado River. “Do you wanna go back and tell them?” she demanded, hopping into a shallow ditch that may have once contained a stream draining into the river. “Because I don’t.”

“We can’t keep searching forever,” he said sadly, following her toward something that looked like a cistern. “Maybe he went back to New Vegas. Look, I don’t want to believe that he’d abandon his own band anymore than you do, but Hopper isn’t like me, Nancy. He may have been born in Hawkins, but he left when he grew up. Got into the city, met a girl, fell in love. He’s a good man, but maybe he just got bored with tending to a dwindling group of nomads. It’s been…a hard year.”

_Understatement_. Over a third of the Hawkins had been slaughter by the White Legs tribe just west of New Canaan only a few months ago. Half of the remaining tribe members had chosen to dissolve from the band – one small group returned the way they’d come to New Canaan. A larger group had risked the long journey through the wilderness to the Vegas strip. Other had simply wandered off in the middle of the night, their sleeping places empty and all their belongings packed away. Some members of the tribe, including their friend Steve, had been so severely injured that they’d been forced to remain in camp for months, barely able to get up and walk on their own.

“I may not’ve been born to the band like you, but I’ve known Hopper long enough,” Nancy said fiercely. “He’s the Chief, Jonathan. And he wouldn’t just abandon his whole tribe to go skipping back to Vegas. His daughter died. His wife is gone. We’re all he has left.”

All of that was true enough. And yet, Jonathan knew there was another, more personal, reason for Nancy’s fervent faith in the Chief.

Hopper was the one who had found Nancy in the broken remains of a house near Primm, teeth bared, pointing an ancient pistol at him. She was thirteen, underfed and dirty with matted hair. Behind her had crouched Mike, nine, nearly as underfed and just as dirty, cowering with a baby in his arms, trying to twist his body so that he would be shielding Holly if they were shot.

He was a father, once. Even been a Desert Ranger, before they were joined with the New California Republic. Hopper knew what it looked like when a child was thirsty, was hungry. The little baby girl, with a cap of bright blonde hair, was listless and floppy in the boy’s arms. The fierce eldest was doing what she could, but a thirteen year old couldn’t make herself create milk for a newborn and he doubted they were able to afford milk from an animal. He hadn’t seen anyone around for miles. That baby wouldn't last the month, no matter how hard she tried.

“Okay,” the Chief said slowly, kneeling to the ground. He was easily four times her size, but Nancy’s hands were steady on the gun. “I’m gonna stay right here and throw you my water flask. Your brother and sister both look thirsty.”

Nancy hadn’t trusted him. He’d come back the very next day with Steve, bright-eyed and full of chatter, who coaxed her into bringing Mike and Holly within viewing distance of the Hawkins camp. The rest was history.

She was his partner. His wife. If he believed in a concept like soulmates, Jonathan would say that Nancy was his. And Hopper was the closest to a father either of them had ever known, just like most of the tribals around their age. Without Hopper, Lonnie Byers would still be giving him and Will bruises.

“I know,” he finally said softly. “But I think I’d rather believe that he chose to leave instead of…”

_Instead of being murdered_.

Nancy frowned and pointed to the cistern, suddenly side-tracked from the sobriety of their discussion. “Why is that out here? Is there a sewer out here?”

Jonathan shook his head. “We left behind the Vegas sewers miles ago. Might be something for the Hoover Dam. But then there would be soldiers guarding it.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Couldn’t hurt to take a look, right?”

Jonathan sighed, then grinned. “Lift the lid, on three.”

“One, two, three…!”

\---

“Your eyes are where?”

Quickly, Max straightened her back and shoulders and lifted her chin to stare up at the blue, blue sky above them. He always seemed to know when her attention had become captured by the wet squelching sounds behind her.

There was dull sticky _thump_ – probably Billy kicking the head down the slope of the hill on the other side of the ledge.

“I’m old enough to learn how,” she protested.

“Yeah?” he said, in a tone that made her clearly picture the nasty sneer on his face. “You wanna learn to kill and cook people, and live in a rusted out old pre-war trailer like those fuckin’ chem heads?”

_The Fiends_. That’s what the people in the California caravans called them. Max wriggled her shoulders angrily. “I eat them, same as you,” she said, rather mutinously. “I should be helping.”

“We eat people because I run out of shit to feed us,” Billy said, and she knew when he was talking around the stub of one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. “Not because I’m real fond of the taste, Maxine.”

“I know,” she muttered, staring at her shoes now.

“Yeah? So no more questions about teaching you how to butcher a raider?” It was phrased as a question, but Max recognized his tone for the command it really was. It promised discipline would be forthcoming if immediate obedience wasn’t given.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice.

At least Billy never hit her in the face or used anything stronger than his own hand. Max had talked to children in those California caravans, in the tribal bands, in towns, at trading posts. The adults there did things way worse than paddling their ass with their hand. Anything from a beating with a gecko-hide whip to weird things at night in the tents happened to them.

Billy would never do any of that to her, Max was sure of that.

It was one of the reasons they were out on the river cliffs eating whatever Billy could kill instead of joining up with a proper tribe or taking up with some mercenaries. They did weird, mean things to the kids that Billy didn’t like – or worse, they didn’t have any children at all.

_Grown men and grown women make small people_, Billy once said. _So if a group of grown men and grown women don’t have any kids, what did they do with them_?

She wasn’t even his real sister. Neil, Billy’s dad, was the leader of the War Dogs, back in New California. Her mom had been his second wife, traded from the Slow Rivers tribe when Max was just barely old enough to walk. Two days after her mom’s death, Billy had sat up from their bedroll in the dead of night and told Max that they were going away now.

Max hadn’t argued, hadn’t asked _why_ – just packed her few clothes up and followed Billy’s steps beyond the blazing light of the War Dogs campfire. She doubted that this far out anyone was still looking for them anymore here in the Mojave, but that first night they walked for two days straight without stopping before Billy would let them find somewhere to pause and rest.

Now Billy wouldn’t join another tribe and they were eating raiders because he couldn’t figure out another way to get food.

A few times, Max has thought about running away during the few very short hours that she was the one on watch while Billy was asleep. He’d do much better if he didn’t have to take care of her. It was her fault that they had to eat humans and they didn’t have enough water and Billy was exhausted all the time.

The only real reason she hadn’t tried yet was she had no doubt that he’d easily hunt her down and find her before she got too far, and she had no idea where she’d even go. He’d do much better without her, but Billy was stubborn and wouldn’t leave her behind.

But the longer they went on, the more certain Max was that Billy was gonna have to leave her somewhere.

Unbeknownst to her, the longer they went on, the more Billy was sure he had no intention of leaving Max _anywhere_.

He was constantly on alert, and he knew his nerves were shot and he was yelling at Max more than he should, but he was trying not to show how royally fucked they were out here.

To the west and north of them were soldiers from New California. He guessed if their situation got really desperate, he’d make Max walk into one of their camps. But she’d have to go by herself. Billy was certain the New California Republic would have wanted posters up with his picture – he was the heir to the War Dogs for nearly a decade and the NRC came to know him _very_ well. It didn’t matter that Billy had left behind the name the War Dogs gave him. He could make Blue Eyes into Billy, but Billy couldn’t turn his face into someone else’s face.

To the south was a Legion camp Billy tried not to get any closer to. Caesar wouldn’t care about Billy’s little _secret,_ but Max was a child. Even worse than that – a _girl_ child. Billy wouldn’t be able to con them into letting him train her up to fight for them. Women weren’t allowed in the Legion. They were property, not people. Max wasn’t old enough to be an officer’s wife.

_Yet_.

** **

**_Probably_**.

But that left Billy hoping they didn’t have an officer who was keen on a thirteen-year-old virgin as a bride. Even if they didn’t, she’d grow up eventually and _then_ where would they be?

Billy could…**shit**. He could say that she _wasn’t_ a virgin. He could say he’d already had her. But he knew those sick fucks. They wouldn’t care. One of them might even enjoy the idea that she was experienced, even if Billy and Max knew it was a lie.

No, better to run to the NCR and let himself be shot or put in the military prison if it really came to that.

Now he was throwing some guy’s intestines into the Colorado River because his survival options had become eat other humans or leave Maxine on the doorstep of some other civilization and hope that they might take better care of her than he was.

Jesus Christ, he was glad Suzie wasn’t alive to see this. He tried to avoid imagining Susan’s face after telling her that he kept his promise to get Maxine away from Neil by dragging her, unwashed and thirsty, around the Mojave and feeding her _people_ for dinner.

But his only other option was leaving Max on somebody else’s doorstep and hoping that they could do a better job. How fucking hard could that be? There had to be someone somewhere out here in this giant fucking ashtray, who would be willing to take a strong adult man to work for them, who wouldn’t kill Max, rape her, beat the shit out of her, or try to sell her like cattle.

If Billy was gonna let any of that happen to her, they could’ve kept their asses well-fed back in the tents in California, with whatever privileges came with being the only children of a tribal warlord. He didn’t really care what they did to _him_ – after growing up under Neil in the War Dogs tribe, Billy could take anything. But Max couldn’t. Max shouldn’t have to.

He resisted the urge to wipe the sweat off his face, even though the sun made it tempting. His hands were covered in blood and guts.

\--- 

“Rob, seriously, I’m not going to just collapse in the middle of walking around,” Steve sighed, tucking his tools and supplies into the open pack sitting on top of his bedroll. “Nothing hurts anymore. I’m sick to death of staring at the same cave walls and I’m sure the kids have been terrorized by Carol and Nicole long enough.”

Reluctantly, Robin admitted “They do really seem to miss us.” She stared at the walls around them, filled with crude drawings they’d done to cheer him up while Joyce had determined he would’ve be able to get up. “They were…really worried about you, for a while. We all were.”

“Nothing to be worried about,” Steve said automatically, and his fingers twitched but he stopped himself from touching the scar in his side where a White Legs warrior had nearly gutted him just before Robin shot the man in the head. “Mama Joyce gave me the all clear.”

According to Joyce, it wasn’t the spear that had nearly killed him. It was the poison the spearhead had been coated with. Hawkins was well acquainted with the usual poison created from datura roots most tribal bands from around Zion used, but she didn’t know the composition for whatever he was given.

Steve didn’t even remember the first three weeks after he’d been hit, but Joyce had been horribly sure they were all going to lose him.

He had seizures and vomited, until the liquid spilling from his mouth was nothing but blood. Then the fever had come, and he’d sweated and cried and screamed with terror at the delusions that came with it. Nothing Joyce tried had helped Steve, and she became resigned to the reality that all she could do was make his death more comfortable.

Robin began trying to prepare all the kids, tried to ease them into the knowledge that their favorite babysitter was not coming back.

None of them took it well – well, James and Troy were okay, but most of the others were devastated. Erica became unnaturally quiet except for sudden fits of temper, Mike was grouchier than ever, and Lucas would stop and just…stare off into space at odd moments. Holly barely understood what was happening, but she kept asking for Steve and Robin kept having to tell her that Steve couldn’t come get her right now. Will and Dustin took it the worst, though.

Will, already the shyest and quietest of them, became nearly nonverbal, with a pale lost look to him. Dustin was the opposite and talked nearly nonstop, except for the moments when he ran off to sob passionately in the hills alone. Robin only knew that because when she told him Steve was getting better, Dustin immediately burst into tears then and there.

In the end, he’d pulled through after all.

“Alright, dingus,” she said affectionately. “Let’s go find your kids.”

Steve suddenly stood a little straighter and tossed a grin in her direction as he finished buckling the pack on. She held out the brahmin-hide whip that would complete the whole outfit and he took it from her hand, almost reverently giving it a little twirl by the handle. “Let’s surprise ‘em.”

The hills just south of Primm were rounded as they followed the road, without much vegetation or scrub, but hard to see over because of their exaggerated shape. They could hear their voices, bouncing around them, but none of the children, not even Holly, were in view as they approached the one spot of color anywhere: Nicole’s auburn hair.

“Thank god,” she spat as she spotted them coming. “All they do is whine at me and fight with each other. I can’t wait to get out of this hellhole.”

Steve rolled his eyes at her retreating back, off to wrangle Carol with her back to guarding the bighorner herd. That was a bit unnecessarily dramatic, especially as Robin had already reported that Carol allowed her little brother Troy and his friend James to terrorize the others – especially Mike and Will. Well, they’d be in for a rude awakening when they realized the old sheriff was back in town.

He resisted the urge to call the kids in – they’d get antsy at being called early, no matter how excited they were to see him, and there was no good reason to bring them in before lunchtime anyway. So he and Robin waited (impatiently in his case) for noon to arrive, talking in the grass with each other, Steve idly working his whip in first one hand and then the other. He’d lost some muscle laying in bed, but the muscles remembered what to do, even if they didn’t do it as smoothly as they used to. Steve just need to spend more time playing with it.

He never allowed the popper to crack, though – sitting down, it would crack way too close to their faces, especially with the short five or six foot bullwhips he and Robin carried around. Up in the pastures guarding the herd, Murray had a twelve foot cattle whip and a twenty-two foot stock whip, and he knew how to use them to really hurt someone, if he wanted to. A hit with something that size could break bones and leave deep gashes even in a Deathclaw’s hide. They were used to scare away predators and poachers and defend the herd.

Steve and Robin’s were mostly for show and sound. He probably couldn’t break any bones, but lashes were painful and took a long time to heal, and if he were careless enough with where he aimed, he could blind himself by accident, which was one of the first lessons every child in Hawkins learned.

Robin began laying out the blankets and raised her eyebrows at him with a pointed look up at the sun. Shading his eyes, Steve broke out into a grin and stood up, relieved when there was no pain or dizziness. Letting himself stand out away from Robin, he circled the whip overhead and let his wrist rotate in a familiar motion.

When the popper cracked, it broke over the barren hills like thunder, the sound carrying away into the distance.

He stood there, watching the downcast troop of children slowly making their way toward them. As usual, Erica was at the head of the group and so she spotted him first, with a shriek that probably carried for miles. “OH MY GOD, IT'S **DINGUS**!”

Only Troy and James didn’t scream with excited glee, and Mike was slowed slightly by carrying Holly in his arms.

Steve grinned broadly, holding out his arms from each of them to rush into, but then pulled back as he retrieved Holly from Mike, frowning slightly. He’s been the child-herder since he turned fourteen, when the Chief thought it would be good for him to stop following Tommy around and noticed that he was pretty good with kids, even littler ones. Steve knows his kids practically like the back of his own hand.

There are only seven children here. He should have eight.

“Where’s Will?”


	2. go to the east, go to the west

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some brief discussion of the practices of the Legion, which include slavery, indoctrination, sexual assault, and boatloads of general misogyny. Also descriptions of child abuse and homophobic slurs, and harm and injury to a child.
> 
> Many of my chapter titles come from songs featured in the game or quest titles (and sometimes both!). This one is from "Back in Your Own Backyard", which is both an in-game quest and a song covered by multiple artists.
> 
> 'The Wendigo' reference is a nod to the Dust overhall mod.

It took Joyce twenty minutes to realize that Hopper only said he was going to the restroom rather than back to the room, and when she lifted her head from the blackjack table, the music in the casino suddenly seemed quieter.

No, not quieter. Muffled. As though someone were holding a pillow over both of her ears.

She stood from the table and the bright colors and patterned carpet in The Tops spun around her. Her knees buckled and a sugary sweet voice said “Oh, you poor dear! Must’ve had too much wine! Let’s get you back to your room!”

“Vuuh…” she slurred, clawing uneasily at the edge of the table, spilling the glass of wine beside her wrist. She couldn’t really feel her face, she realized, and her muscles had turned to river sludge.

The hand beneath her elbow yanked her up hard, cooing sweetly “Oops, careful there, miss! Yes, we’ll just help you up to bed and you can lay down.”

She thrashed and kicked as he begun dragging her toward the elevator. “H-Hop…Hopper…” she cried hoarsely, cursing the ineffectiveness of her own struggles. “No…Vul…pes…”

“It’s flattering to be remembered,” Vulpes Inculta murmured in her ear. “Don’t worry about your Chief, Mrs. Byers. We intend to reunite you very soon. The two of you are going to be a rather thrilling example of what happens to people who refuse Caesar’s generosity.”

The elevator opened on something that looked like a basement, and by that point, Vulpes was basically dragging Joyce alone – none of her muscles seem to be working correctly anymore and her face, toes, and fingers had lost all feeling.

“What did you do to her?” Hopper growled, staring anxiously at his second in command. Joyce’s eyes met his, but they were out of focus and she made a weak attempt to stumble toward him, despite Vulpes Inculta’s grip. He was stopped from going to her by the legionnaire on his right, who tapped his gun against his chest in a meaningful manner.

“Not to worry, Chieftain. I’ve just given her something to make her feel a bit more relaxed,” Vulpes said with an oily grin. “It seems my intel was spot-on – you’re very attached to Mrs. Byers, aren’t you?”

“Do you honestly think that the NCR will stand by and let you slaughter my tribe on their front door?” he demanded.

“Oh, Chieftain. No, no, no,” Vulpes cooed, with an even wider, even oilier smile. “We aren’t going to kill the Hawkins band, Hopper. You’re going to give them to us.”

“And what the hell makes you think I’ll do that?”

“Because if you don’t convince your tribe to join with Caesar, I’m going to let you watch the officers break your dear Mrs. Byers into to the slave pens.” Hopper’s whole being froze and Vulpes nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m sure you know what happens there. What was that you said, Chieftain? ‘_A horde of brutal beasts and rapists’_? May I assume from your expression that you’ve suddenly had a change of heart?”

“You must really think I’m stupid. What difference does it even make?” Hopper snarled. “You’ll send her there no matter what I say.”

“Yes, but this way you can spare her the horrible indignity of witnessing such a thing and perhaps she can have a quiet life as an officer’s wife.”

“Rathhher…die…” Joyce slurred, and the only time he’d ever felt this deeply sick with a situation was when he realized that they hadn’t given Sarah the medicine in time to stop the radiation from killing her.

“That could be arranged quiet easily,” Vulpes said coolly. To another legionnaire, “Put a collar on Mrs. Byers, and make sure it’s secure. We don’t want the Chief getting any ideas of making a daring rescue.”

The streets outside were lined with New California soldiers, every inch of the New Vegas Strip patrolled by MPs and Securitron robots. Vulpes Inculta was a smug son of a bitch, but he wasn’t going to risk his head by dragging the heads of one of the most prominent allies the NCR had in the Mojave down the street with bomb collars around their necks.

“Make your own way to Fortification Hill before sunset tomorrow,” Vulpes drawled, sounding rather bored now that the posturing and intimidation were over with. “You’ll need to go into Cottonwood Cove and catch the ferry – you won’t be able to get past the NCR’s barricade at Hoover Dam. Since you only have twenty-eight hours, I strongly suggest you start…now.”

He threw Joyce forward, permitting his goons to stand down so that Hopper could catch her before her face crashed into a storage cupboard.

“I can’t take her anywhere like this!” he hissed, aching inside as he watched her dark lashes flutter, her weak grip on his shirt slipping a moment after she held it. “She can barely hold her eyes open, let alone standing and walking around! Do you think I can carry her all the way to Cottonwood?”

Vulpes looked close to rolling his eyes. “Very well. I shall inform Caesar to expect you at sunrise, _thirty-six_ hours from now. That should cover the time necessary for the drug to wear off, but I caution you again – do not waste your remaining time. Because if you are _not_ at Fortification Hill by the time the sun sets tomorrow, Mrs. Byers will lose her head, Chieftain.”

He had to drag Joyce back to their hotel room – they never got separate rooms. Nobody in Hawkins slept by themselves, traveled by themselves, worked by themselves. It was too dangerous.

She was awake for he was, hours before the sun rose, just staring at the carpet. Faded even in a nice room like this one. “We can’t do this. We can’t sell Hawkins over to Caesar, Hop.”

“I’m not going to sit on my ass and let you get…let them do that you,” he replied, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray on the nightstand.

Her head bowed forward, dark hair concealing her expression. “It meant it,” she said quietly. “I’d rather die. They’d have to blow me up, Hop.”

“I know,” he said, through the incredible crushing pain in his chest. “I know you meant it.”

She’s already survived and escaped one shitty husband, but Hopper wasn’t callous enough to say that out loud. One of the first things he’d done after returning to the Hawkins band and taking over as Chief from Sand Fox had been throwing Lonnie Byers down onto the sand and telling him to hit the fucking road.

He and Joyce were some of the last descendants of the original Hawkins band, the original people who’d walked across the wilderness with their herds. Them and Murray and Lauren’s boy Steve were probably the last remnants of those people. The others, including Lonnie, were people gathered into Hawkins along the way.

Sand Fox had been a raider before leading Hawkins, and he led Hawkins sort of like a raider, too – a nice raider, but a raider. He didn’t say dick about the fact that Lonnie’s children were both scared of him and his wife had become a pale, nervous, sick-looking shadow of the girl she used to be. As long as Lonnie kept it quiet, he was willing to let it go – along with the bad behavior of several other members of the tribe.

Hopper had decided, watching Lonnie grab Jonathan, ten years old and a third of his father’s size, grab him by the arm and twist it behind his back – “Get moving, pussy! You can’t whine your way out of a whipping!” – that Hawkins was gonna go back to the old ways. Then he’d grabbed Lonnie the same way, twisting his arm until he yelped like a kicked coyote, and threw him into the sand.

“Get the hell out of here,” he’d barked. “I might consider letting you back in if your wife can convince me this is a fluke and you’re really a decent father, but I wouldn’t count on that.”

He remembered Jonathan, bruises all up and down his arm. (And his neck, and on his back, and across his buttocks and thighs, he later learned. Lonnie didn’t get nearly enough of his own medicine.) Underfed even though they hadn’t really had a tough year since Hopper was a teenage, standing there and shivering hard in the midday sun. Hopper had just stood there and put his hand around the back of Jonathan’s head, nearly the same size of his whole palm, and when he started to cry silently into his side, said nothing. Let him shiver and cry as much as he needed to, and kept his hand on his head.

Hopper knew what some people said about him and Joyce Byers. That he wanted her, that he got rid of Lonnie so that he could have Lonnie’s wife without risking his position as the Chief. He wanted her for sure, but first in his mind was that he _wanted_ her to be free. And now it seemed that he’d gotten her into another prison.

“We’re going to have to warn them,” Joyce said, chin set stubbornly into a hard determined line.

That, he was certain, that was the face that gotten her the scars of a Deathclaw’s slash imprinted faintly into her back and shoulders. A baby Deathclaw, but still. She was legendary in the tribe for that alone, because she’d _lived_.

“And how are we going to hide them? The herd is nearly a hundred strong – we can’t go back to Zion.” For many reasons. A third of the tribe had been slaughtered between Zion and New Canaan, but before that a monster in Zion Canyon had terrorized the children and nearly carried Will away. It was only some fast thinking by Mike and Dustin, who realized that the monster couldn’t swim, and Steve’s rather insane bravery in going back for Will that kept all of them alive.

“We can figure that out on the road,” she said, and Hopper never claimed to be a sensible man, but he knew when he’d lost an argument.

They never did figure it out.

There was an NCR patrol just as they were skirting Camp Forlorn Hope and they both agreed that they would need to avoid them. Whenever commanding officers spotted able-bodied travelers, especially travelers without registered citizenship papers, they tended to attempt to recruit them, and they would ask lots of lots of questions that Joyce and Hopper didn’t really have time for.

So they hide in an old pre-war bunker.

“This looks like a Vault-Tec creation,” he muttered, something prickling at the back of his neck. With few – _very few_ – exceptions, Vaults often had nasty surprises waiting inside them, if they ever even opened at all, horrors of pre-war experimentation waiting to be unleashed. He was actually willing to place bets that was where the monster in Zion Canyon had come from.

Joyce placed a small hand on his arm. “Do you hear that?”

He froze. “Voices?”

She shook her head. “No, Hop. _Music_.”

_“…we find that we know…to let go…Begin, begin again…_”

\---

Nancy’s head hurt. Her left side _really_ hurt, throbbing and bruised up, and her arm had gone numb from where her weight had been resting on it. “J-Jonathan…?”

He was there, she remembered him being there when they walked into the room with the music, but as she picked herself up from a pile of rubble and cobblestones in the middle of a dim city square, Nancy didn’t see Jonathan anywhere. And there was-there was a slave collar around her neck, but she seemed to be entirely alone in the empty plaza, the whole town a shabby collection of building beneath a hellish, rust-red cloudy sky.

Woozy, she tried to pull herself up with the edge of the dried-up fountain to support her weight and flinched as a light flickered on at the top of the fountain. “Good to see you awake and well, Mrs. Byers. Or perhaps I shall call you Nancy, since we don’t want to be mistaking you with your mother in law.”

She stared at the image of a man, feeling disoriented and terrified as he stared back at her. “Who-who are you? Why am I here? What did you do with Jonathan?”

“My name is Martin Brenner, and your husband is perfectly safe, Nancy. Just running a few errands for me,” the man said, with no warmth and very little politeness. “And if the four of you obey my instructions and follow my orders, you will continue to be perfectly safe. But if any of you try to play stupid, play clever, or refuse to comply, that collar on your neck will go off and take your head with it. There’s no escape from here until I let you go.”

“The four of us?” she asked faintly.

“You, your husband, your mother in law, and your Chief,” Brenner clarified irritably. She had no time to rejoice in Hopper being alive. “See that casino in the distance, above the fountain? That’s the Sierra Madre. You’re going to help me break into it. The villa you’re standing in is a dumping ground of failed construction, a collection of pre-war junk. But inside that casino, is a railway terminal leading back into Big Mountain and that’s where you’re going to get me.”

“Why would you want to get there so badly?”

“That isn’t of any concern to you,” he said dismissively. “But I would advise that you work very hard to keep each other alive – the explosive devices in your collars are linked together, so if any of them should happen to go off, the other three will explode as well.”

\---

“Where’s Will?”

The moment the words left his lips, Steve knew he was gonna get angry.

James and Troy’s faces went remarkably blank and the other children blinked up at him and Robin, looking genuinely confused. Dustin said “Well…we thought he went to see you.”

Looking supremely uncomfortable, Lucas added “He’s been gone for hours, Steve.”

He had to give Holly to Robin, because she’d seen him yell before, but he wasn’t going to do it with her right in his arms. The child-herder was assigned to the job by the Chief and they had almost complete control over the kids in the Hawkins band. Steve had been the child-herder for five, close to six years now. He didn’t normally believe in screaming at them or hitting them to get them to cooperate with him. He was not proud of what he was about to do. But that wasn’t going to stop Steve from doing it.

He struck as fast as a nightstalker, pinching the top of Troy’s ear with one hand and grabbing James’ with the other. “What did you do?” he growled, making them wail as he twisted hard and gave them both a little shake. “And don’t you dare lie to me, I know what your sister and her friends say, but I’m not _that_ slow. I know it had to be at _least_ one of you.”

Sniveling a little, Troy – the ringleader – yelped, “We were just messing around, we pretended we were gonna push him down to the old highway! He ran away crying like a ninny!”

Robin inhaled sharply. “That’s-that’s like a three-story building, Steve! What were you thinking?!” she demanded. “Even if a fall from that distance didn’t kill him, he’d never be able to walk again!”

“Where did he go then, huh? Which direction did he run in?!” Hissing furiously, Steve shook them again, making both boys yowl. “And don’t lie to me! I’m a sentence away from pushing _you_ down the hill!”

“Ow-OW-by the little shack!” James yelped. “Where-OW-where that weird train thingy is!”

He shoved them both back, hard. “I’ll deal with you later,” he spat. To Robin “Stay with ‘em. I’ll go get Will.”

“We can go with-!” Mike said, looking noticeably worried despite the brave face he was trying to keep on.

“No,” he said sharply, then more gently. “Stay with Robin and eat your lunch. I don’t want anyone else getting lost.”

His hands were shaking as he looped his whip over his forearm and navigated the hilly terrain over to the road that cut through Hawkins camp. To the east of the road were the main camps with the great windmill jutting out over the uneven landscape. To the north and south of them were the grazing lands where the they rotated the herds through.

Children got lost, sometimes. It was first thing you were taught as a new child-herder, the first thing he’d had to teach Robin. Sometimes, children were going to get lost and you just had to keep your head. They weren’t necessarily good at following orders, some of them, and he couldn’t watch all of them at once. Of course, it also would’ve been helpful if Carol and Nicole had literally been _watching them at all_, but that was another thing Steve would have to deal with later.

The problem was that children got lost, sometimes.

Children. Not Will.

Will was his only charge that had been born into the band, was raised beneath the care of first his own mother and Flo, the child-herders when Steve was a little boy, and then Steve himself. Will _knew_ what usually befell children who left the safety of the herder – he didn’t wander off and he didn’t disobey.

Steve had only lost track of Will once before, in Zion. And Will hadn’t wandered off then, either. He’d been _taken_.

The Sorrows and Dead Horse tribes had fled Zion Canyon up through the Grand Staircase, driven out of the land by a creature they called the ‘Wendigo’ – a creature that the children later named the ‘Demogorgon’. An alien-looking monster with long gray hairless limbs and the face of a many-toothed flower. It had burrowed into the extensive caverns dotted throughout the canyon.

Steve didn’t know _why_ it had tried to take Will – the Sorrows said that the Wendigo/Demogorgon ate people. He’d gone after it assuming that he’d either be ripped to pieces or he’d retrieve Will’s body for his mother and his brother to bury.

Instead, the Demogorgon had been trying to drag Will, screaming and kicking the whole way, through one of its own dank underground tunnels. He’d set it on fire, but the phantom of that creature had hung over Will’s head ever since that day.

He just seemed to…go away, sometimes. His mind left his body behind and it took a while to get him to come back to himself. Sometimes…sometimes his body kept moving even after his mind had left and one of the other kids would have to corall him back to the rest of the herd.

Steve wasn’t just worried that Will had gotten hurt – he was worried that Will was somewhere out on the hills, by himself, zoned out into nowhere, maybe getting farther away from the rest of his tribe every minute. And in that state, anything could happen to him – on top of the tendency to wander, Will would be totally unaware of his surroundings. Legionnaires patrolled this area, he knew they did.

The Chief had made his position on Caesar very clear which was why they’d been attacked by the White Legs coming out of Zion, but Hawkins was such a large provider of rations to the NCR stationed in the Mojave that this close to their camps, they hadn’t dared to openly attack the band…yet. “_I’m not Salt-Upon-Wounds. All those nice words can’t trick me into making Hawkins your newest herd of cattle to that horde of brutal beasts and rapists. Tell your god-king he can kiss my ass, frumentarii_.”

But Hawkins kids were well fed and generally very healthy for tribals, and they’d never pass up the opportunity to pick up one wandering around by themselves, alone and confused. Will had good health and a broken mind – they wouldn’t train him up for indoctrination in the Legion. No, they’d throw him straight into the slave pens.

“Whip-poor-Will?!” Steve called, the road sloping downward toward Nipton, burned and raised to the ground weeks before. A punishment for the citizens of the town, and a warning for the Chief of Hawkins. “Whip-poor-Will?! It’s Steve-adore! Time to come home! Will?!”

He veered off the road and away from Nipton as he got closer to smaller rocky area when the old shack and the abandoned train tunnels were, still calling for Will. The longer he spent without an answer, the more distraught he became.

In five years with the children, Steve had never lost a child, never had one die in his care. They grew old enough to apprentice under someone in the tribe or their parents moved on somewhere else and took the kids with them.

Steve had been there for Will’s entire life, and Joyce Byers was the closest thing to a mother Steve had ever known – his parents were both from Hawkins, but his mother had died early in his childhood and his father had never taken any interest in his only surviving child. He didn’t know what he would with himself if he had to tell her Will that had been lost, forever.

“Whip-poor-Will! Wil-oh my god.”

Standing in the middle of the old train tracks was a small child with very dark hair. “Darling? Will?” His littlest boy was blank-eyed, staring off into a broken up pre-war parking lot. “Do you hear me, baby?”

Will didn’t even flinch as Steve came up to gently touch his face. Somehow, by the mercy of some ancestor, he was completely unhurt, without a single scratch on him. Steve touched his face again, gently stroking at the apples of each cheek with his thumbs. Will made a quiet noise of distress.

“It’s alright,” he soothed. “It’s alright whip-poor-Will. You’re home, baby.”

“Steve…adore,” he said slowly.

Breathing a long sigh of relief, Steve folded Will up in his arms. “That’s right, Will. It’s your Steve-adore.”

“I heard…a voice,” Will said uneasily. “Calling for me.”

“That was just me, whip-poor-Will. I was calling for you.” He gently steered Will’s shoulders back in the other direction. The knot in his stomach was finally loosening. “Rockin’ Robin has lunch ready, let’s go back and see her.”

James and Troy were still waiting back with Robin as he instructed, pouting at being yelled at. Steve got Will get with the others, under Robin’s careful watch, before he crooked a finger at them. “Come with me,” he said shortly, climbing back over the hills toward the windmill. On the hot broken asphalt of the road winding through the landscape, Steve said, “Get out.”

Both boys’ mouths dropped open. “You heard me,” he said, swirling the whip in his right hand. “You think you have the power to make life or death decisions for your tribe members. You’re big boys, you can take care of yourselves! So I’ve decided that you’re adults now. You don’t need me, right? You don’t even fucking like me. So _get out_.”

With the whip, he gestured northward. “Go find the bighorners and let Murray give you something to do, since you’re so bored here with me you try to entertain yourselves by getting someone killed.”

James, with slightly more common sense than Troy, nervously eyed the northern road. “What about weapons?”

“You didn’t give Will one,” Steve said, with cold finality. “Go on. I don’t wanna see you back here ever again and if you give any of my kids shit again, I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

“You said we’re adults now!” Troy was a fucking idiot who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Murray was gonna kill him. “You can’t punish us!”

“My job is to protect the children,” he said coolly. “And I can do that any way I please – including giving adults who harass them a whipping.”

\---

Papa was not here, but she was still not allowed to go Outside. It wasn’t safe for her there.

Papa’s workers still brought subjects in, performed the operations the way the machines were programmed to. When they came in, the new ones were silent in her head, quiet. When they were done, the Others could hear her, but they wouldn’t _listen_ to her.

She needed one to help her. She couldn’t get into the red place by herself – it was all the way across the Empty, and there were monsters in the way. The Others, old subjects like her, and things from The Before. She had to stop the monsters who followed Papa’s rules, but she needed one who would help her first.

They weren’t Nice, they didn’t like her. Wanted to hurt her because of what Papa’s monsters did to them. Did hurt her, at the place where she walked, until she had to hide herself back in the blue place. Back with the Sink.

Sink could give her things to make her stomach feel better (“Food, Miss Eleven”) but the Others had ruined the place where she walked.

It hurt to walk and it hurt to lie down and she’d got rid of Papa, but she was lonely and scared here by herself. She hid in the room with the bowls of water and cried on the floor. She cried a lot, which she wasn’t supposed to do, but Papa wasn’t her to punish her for it anyway.

“Miss Eleven,” Sink cooed. “You need to rest your leg.”

“Hurts,” she mewled, clinging to the edge of the Sink’s round table, face illuminated in the blue light of the map on the surface.

“I know, Miss,” Sink said soothingly. “Go back to bed and rest.”

“…bed?”

“The long soft table.”

“Ah.” ‘Bed’ felt much better than the floor, made the part she walks on – leg – feel a little better too, and in time, it stopped hurting so badly.

She still didn’t walk very good – Sink said that her bone, the hard parts beneath her skin, had healed incorrectly, and the Auto-Doc didn’t work after Papa pulled its microchip out.

She tried to talk to each new subject, tried to make them listen. She spoke to each one who survived the Three Cuts on the Table, she tried to get them to help her.

But none of them liked her. None of them were _Nice_.

She didn’t know what to do.

She didn’t dare to go back to Outside – not even on the high balcony just across from the Sink. The Others were watching, waiting for her to leave. Sink won’t let them in, won’t allow them to come in and hurt her again, so as long as she stayed Inside, she was safe.

She could…she could bring a Real Person to the Empty. But she was almost more afraid of them than she was of the Others. She doesn’t talk so good, with her mouth. She never really needed to – the Others understand her, even if they don’t like her, and that was the part Papa cared about, about her talking even when her tongue didn’t move.

But Papa was a Real Person, and his assistants, Connie and Ray, were too, before she’d had to make them Stop. They had done this to her, made her and made the Others like her.

Well, no. She was not like the Others. Papa said she was special, because of the speaking with her mouth closed, and the way the Others were connected to her. He’d wanted to know how and why. He’d wanted…wanted her to control the Others – and she could, even though it made her nose bleed. Her ears had bled, too, when she had to stop them from killing her.

She wasn’t strong enough to do it all the time, but she could if she tried really hard. Even though they didn’t like her, they didn’t want to listen to her, she could _make_ them, could force one or two to do what she wanted for a short time if she concentrated hard enough. Papa wanted her to be able to do it on a Real Person, one day.

She was pretty confident that her name was Eleven, but in the lab, Papa always said that she was ‘the Mindflayer’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep I did that. Eleven needs some parents, y'all. Anyone know where she can find some?
> 
> Jim Hopper keeps drinking that good respect women juice (he seems to do this pretty well in canon, despite his emotional constipation). Also: scarred badass Joyce Byers and soft dad Jim Hopper, because  
I N E E D T H A T I N M Y L I F E  
and sometimes you gotta be the change you wanna see ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> (oh my god, i actually made it to chapter two, guys! i could seriously cry right now)


End file.
